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Descriptive representation is passing through a huge conceptual restructuring whose first main results materialized in the publication of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. From this perspective, citing and referencing metadata, which were considered as facets of descriptive representation, were approached towards a reflection on what is, and what are the trends on the role of bibliographic references and citation metadata in the citation network scenario and what are the possible impacts of these changes in bibliographic metadata representation and citation network. The main objectives of this study are to discuss the role assumed by bibliographic references in the citation network, considering them as a facet of descriptive representation and point the possible impacts to be expected in bibliographic metadata representation and citation network fields, considering the descriptive representation restructuring. Starting from this, the usage of the FaBiO Ontology on describing bibliographic metadata is pointed as a facilitating instrument for bibliographic metadata management in the context of the elaboration of bibliographic references. The method involved qualitative and quantitative analysis of citing and referencing elements (i.e., bibliographic references, mentions, quotations, and respective in-text reference pointers) identified citing and referencing habits within disciplines considered in the SCImago Journal & Country Rank and errors occurring during the transcription of citing and referencing metadata withing scientific articles over the long term, as stated by previous studies now expanded. Future expected trends of information retrieval from bibliographic metadata were gathered by approaching these referencing elements from the FRBR Entities concepts and the use of semantic resources, specifically the use of FaBiO Ontology on bibliographic metadata processing as an instrument of strengthening the citation network and an enabler of the automatic gathering of bibliographic metadata by reference managers, as a means of saving researchers time on normalization tasks, in addition to the provision of more clear, efficient, and consistent bibliographic metadata within bibliographic references. The findings showed that reference styles do not fully accomplish with their role of guiding authors and publishers on providing concise and well-structured bibliographic metadata within bibliographic references. The analysis of the dynamics of the relation between mentions, quotations and its respective bibliographic references showed, first, long stand errors in citing and referencing metadata, which contribute to the lack of standardization (or is worsened by it). Second, Reference styles do not provide broad and clear coverage of all aspects concerning bibliographic metadata description in the form of bibliographic references. Third, publishers do not demonstrate great efforts to improve bibliographic metadata included in the articles bibliographic references lists. The improvement on the way which bibliographic metadata is provided within bibliographic references depends on a joint effort between the Scientific community (here understood as the authors and the publishers including all the agents involved with the editorial process), besides the Information Science and Computer Science community.